A Panic Attack Cannot Hurt You

You may have noticed that I haven’t written a blog post in a while. I’ve been busy working on my Overcoming Panic Attacks program- an online yoga and meditation based program that is completely self-paced. I’m currently running a 48-hour sale for my blog readers. You can find out more information, as well as see a full, detailed outline of the curriculum here.

And now I’ll be back to weekly blog posts! The following article is from the Overcoming Panic program. Lots of love and light to you all!

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One of the hardest things to accept is that a panic attack cannot hurt you. It’s especially difficult when the panic attack comes out of the blue, when nothing was there to provoke it. You might believe that you’re losing control, or that you’re dying, or that you’re going crazy, or that you’re one second away from suffocating.

But realizing that panic cannot hurt you is also one of the most important, if not THE most important thing to learn in order to overcome this cycle of fear.

Panic attacks do an amazingly convincing job at scaring us. They make us believe that something is very, very wrong and that we have every reason to be terrified. And really, that’s fear doing its job. If there were an actual threat, we would be primed and ready to deal with it.

You can tell yourself a million times that panic cannot hurt you, but until you start to believe it, you’ll still brace yourself against the fear. You’ll try with all of your might to make it go away. You’ll believe you can’t handle it. You’ll avoid feeling that fear again at all costs.

What if you truly believed panic couldn’t hurt you?

Then, when panic came to visit, you could see it for what it is- JUST fear coursing through your body. You could allow it to be there, knowing that even though it feels awful, you’re not in danger. You could go out and do all the things you want to do, because you know with all your heart that fear won’t cause any of the horrible things you’ve dreamed up. You could sit with fear, be kind to fear.

We keep panic around when we fear it, plain and simple.

I started to see the biggest shift in my recovery when I no longer let panic have all the control. I would have a panic attack, it would seem like a brand new, horrifying experience, and I would get very, very scared. But then, instead of believing I was in danger, I told myself that there was nothing to fear. I told myself that this was just fear manifesting in my body and that I was completely safe. I just needed to breathe with the sensations and know that it would pass.

Trust me, I KNOW how hard it is to convince yourself that you’re not in danger. Your whole entire body is telling you to DO SOMETHING. To counteract that basic instinct is incredibly difficult.

But we practice. We practice meeting our fear with truth. We gain as much knowledge and information as we need in order to begin believing that we’re not in danger.

We love ourselves up to the brim, all the while knowing that we are so much stronger than the waves of fear that crash over us. We are the still ocean underneath, able to feel the waves, but not getting swept up in them.